Down the slope the boys and Dienekes had been joined by the other lads of the farm. A game of ball had started. The boys' cries of agon, of contention and competition, pealed brightly up the slope to where the lady sat.
One could feel only gratitude for that which had sprung so nobly from her heart: the wish to grant to me that clemency which she felt moira, fate, had denied her. To grant to me and her whom I loved a chance to slip the bonds she felt herself and her husband imprisoned in.
I could offer nothing save that which she already knew.! could not go. Besides, the gods would be there already. As ever, one jump ahead.
I saw her shoulders straighten then, as her will brought to heel the gallant but impossible impulse of her heart.
Your cousin will learn where your body lies, and with what honor you perished. By Helen and the Twins, I swear this.
The lady rose from her bench of oak. The interview was over. She had become again a Spartan.
Now here on the morn of the march-out I beheld upon her face that same austere mask. The lady released her husband's embrace and gathered her children to her, resuming that posture, erect and solemn, replicated by the line of other Spartan wives extending fore and rear beneath the oaks.
I saw Leonidas embrace his wife, Gorgo, Bright Eyes, their daughters, and his son, the boy Pleistarchus, who would one day take his place as king.
My own wife, Thereia, held me hard, grinding against me beneath her Messenian white robe, while she held our infants crooked in one arm. She would not be husbandless for long. Wait at least until I'm out of sight, I joked, and held my children, whom I hardly knew. Their mother was a good woman. I wish I could have loved her as she deserved.
The final sacrifices were over, omens taken and recorded. The Three Hundred formed up, each Peer with a single squire, in the long shadows cast by distant Parnon, with the entire army in witness upon the shield-side slope. Leonidas assumed his place before them, beside the stone altar, garlanded as they. The remainder of the whole city, old men and boys, wives and mothers, helots and craftsmen, stood drawn up upon the spear-side rise. It was not yet daybreak; the sun still had not peeked above Parnon's crest.
Death stands close upon us now, the king spoke. Can you feel him, brothers? I do. I am human and I fear him. My eyes cast about for a sight to fortify the heart for that moment when I come to look him in the face, Leonidas began softly, his voice carrying in the dawn stillness, heard with ease by all.
Shall I tell you where I find this strength, friends? In the eyes of our sons in scarlet before us, yes. And in the countenances of their comrades who will follow in battles to come.
But more than that, my heart finds courage from these, our women, who watch in tearless silence as we go.
He gestured to the assembled dames and ladies, singling out two matriarchs, Pyrrho and Alkmene, and citing them by name. How many times have these twain stood here in the chill shade of Parnon and watched those they love march out to war? Pyrrho, you have seen grandfathers and father troop away down the Aphetaid, never to return. Alkmene, your eyes have held themselves unweeping as husband and brothers have departed to their deaths. Now here you stand again, with no few others who have borne as much and more, watching sons and grandsons march off to hell.
This was true. The matriarch Pyrrho's son Doreion stood garlanded now among the Knights;
Alkmene's grandsons were the champions Alpheus and Maron.
Men's pain is lightly borne and swiftly over. Our wounds are of the flesh, which is nothing; women's is of the heart- sorrow unending, far more bitter to bear.
Leonidas gestured to the wives and mothers assembled along the still-shadowed slopes.
Learn from them, brothers, from their pain in childbirth which the gods have ordained immutable. Bear witness to that lesson they teach: nothing good in life comes but at a price.
Sweetest of all is liberty. This we have chosen and this we pay for. We have embraced the laws of Lykurgus, and they are stern laws. They have schooled us to scorn the life of leisure, which this rich land of ours would bestow upon us if we wished, and instead to enroll ourselves in the academy of discipline and sacrifice. Guided by these laws, our fathers for twenty generations have breathed the blessed air of freedom and have paid the bill in full when it was presented. We, their sons, can do no less.
Into each warrior's hand was placed by his squire a cup of wine, his own ritual chalice, presented to him on the day he became a Peer and brought forth only for ceremonies of the gravest solemnity. Leonidas held his own aloft with a prayer to Zeus All-Conquering and Helen and the Twins. He poured the libation.
In years six hundred, so the poets say, no Spartan woman has beheld the smoke of the enemy's fires.
Leonidas lifted both arms and straightened, garlanded, raising his countenance to the gods.
By Zeus and Eros, by Athena Protectress and Artemis Upright, by the Muses and all the gods and heroes who defend Lakedaemon and by the blood of my own flesh, I swear that our wives and daughters, our sisters and mothers, will not behold those fires now.
He drank, and the men followed him.
Chapter Twenty One
His Majesty is well familiar with the topography of the approaches, defiles and the compressed battle plain wherein his armies engaged the Spartans and their allies at the Hot Gates. I will pass over this, addressing instead the composition of the Greek forces and the state of discord and disorder which prevailed as these arrived and took station, preparatory to defending the pass.
When the Three Hundred-now reinforced by five hundred heavy infantry from Tegea and a matching number from Mantinea, along with two thousand combined from Orchomenos and the rest of Arkadia, Corinth, Phlius and Mycenae, plus seven hundred from Thespiae and four hundred from Thebes-arrived at Opountian Lokris, ten miles from the Hot Gates, there to be joined by a thousand heavy infantry from Phokis and Lokris, they found instead the entire countryside deserted.
Only a few boys and young men of the neighborhood remained, and these occupied themselves in looting the abandoned homes of their neighbors and appropriating whatever stores of wine they could disinter from their compatriots' caches. They took to their heels at the sight of the Spartans, but the rangers ran them down. The army and populace of Lokris, the pimply pillagers reported, had taken to the hills, while the locals' chieftains were scurrying north toward the Persians as fast as their spindly shanks would bear them. In fact, the urchins claimed, their headmen had already capitulated.
Leonidas was furious. It was determined, however, in a hasty and decidedly ungentle interrogation of these farmyard freebooters, that the Lokrians of Opus had gotten the day of assembly wrong. Apparently the month called Karneius in Sparta is named Lemendieon in Lokris. Further its start is counted backward from the full moon, rather than forward from the new. The Lokrians had expected the Spartans two days earlier and, when these failed to appear, determined that they had been left in the lurch. They bolted amid bitter oaths and maledictions, which the gales of rumor scattered swiftly into neighboring Phokis, in which country the Gates themselves are located and whose inhabitants were already in terror of being overrun. The Phokians had hightailed it too.
All along the march north, the allied column had encountered country tribes and villagers fleeing, streaming south along the military road, or what had now become a military road. Tattered clan groups fled before the Persian advance, bearing their pitiful possessions in shoulder sacks contrived from bedcovers or bundled cloaks, balancing their ragged parcels like water vessels atop their heads. Sunken-cheeked husbandmen wheeled handbarrows whose cargoes were more often flesh than furniture, children whose legs had given out from the tramp or bundled ancients hobbled with age. A few had oxcarts and pack asses. Pets and farm stock jostled underfoot, gaunt hounds cadging for a handout, doleful-looking swine being kicked along as if they knew they would be supper in a night or two. The main of the refugees were female; they trudged barefoot, shoes slung about their necks to save the leather.